All right, we're going to go ahead and get started. And I'm so pleased to join Mike here for a Fireside Chat to talk a little bit more about Blackbaud. And it's really fun to talk about a company that really is not only a wonderful company to invest in, but a company that really cares and really does have a social impact that really does matter. So I'm excited to talk about that specifically with Mike today, a little bit of a different conversation than a lot of the conversations that we've had today already. So, Mike, why don't you start by educating us a little bit about Blackbaud, walk us through the value proposition, and what you guys do for your customers?
Yeah, sure, so we're a vertical software company headquartered in Charleston, South Carolina. We focus on the global social good space, so our customers are nonprofits, foundations, foundations within universities and hospital systems, foundations within companies. Our customers are K through 12 schools. We have a platform for companies for their corporate social responsibility programs, and also part of Blackbaud that you all might be familiar with is JustGiving, as well as one of our businesses.
Fantastic, and so let's dive right into your Q3 2025 results. Tell us some of the highlights and takeaways from your perspective, and I know it's only halfway through the morning, but where are investors really digging in? What are they asking questions about?
Yeah, sure. So we're having a great year this year, including Q3. After Q2, we raised our guidance in all of our categories. After Q3, we raised cash flow guidance again. And it's been a really good year for us. The company is achieving our financial goals. We're doing really well with new logos, bringing new solutions to market. We have some great announcements a month or so ago at our user conferences around new products coming out in 2026. So we feel good about our results. We feel good about the setup for next year as well.
Perfect. So let's talk about your addressable market and where you see the most opportunity. You talked about new logos, but let's talk about, let's look not in the rearview mirror, but in the, I guess, looking going forward. So talk to us a little bit about the addressable opportunity and the addressable market for you guys for the future.
Yeah, so we have our TAM at $10 billion. We focus on institutions that are sort of mid-tier and enterprise size opportunities. Our go-to-market is a direct sales channel. We're in the verticals that I just explained. We've had a really good year with new logos in our K-12 space, in our corporate space with our YourCause platform. It's been a really good year. Every quarter in our earnings call, I usually announce some kind of new logos. And a lot of them this year have been very recognizable names. So we're very happy with our expansion plans and our go-to-market. It's a good setup for next year. We're going to end the year strong this year. And we're very excited about the model that we're talking about in the long run.
For us, you could think of us as a mid-single-digit organic grower with some upside to that, higher than that, EBITDA growth, double-digit earnings per share, and a really strong cash flow story as well.
Great, great, and so when we look at the nonprofit space, can you walk us through some of the mega trends that are impacting that space today, and then overall on fundraising, what does that look like today versus five or ten years ago?
Yeah, it's surprisingly a very large and resilient space if you haven't really studied it, and a lot of folks don't, so just in the U.S., giving in the U.S. is around $600 billion a year, and if you go back over 40 years, it pretty much tracks U.S. GDP, so it grows 2%, 3% a year. In some difficult years like in 2007 and 2008, it went down a little bit, but at $600 billion a year, it's a massive market. It grew 6% last year, so a very large, very resilient market. The biggest test of our market was COVID, so when COVID showed up, we didn't know what was going to happen with customers. We didn't see any customers close permanently. We saw them hunker down. We saw them focus on online activities.
And we worked with thousands of customers around the world to help them get through that. So we had schools where the kids were at home, but the schools were still running. We had performing arts centers that closed for a while. They all opened up. So very resilient end marketplace and a very large market.
So if we were to ask what your impact is by macro events, you would say that you're able to clearly weather the storm.
Yeah, that's a good way to say it. This past year, some of the changes in the U.S. were a pullback in government funding. And so we saw some customers get less government funding. We're not in the fund flow of that. Our solutions are not in that fund flow. However, our platforms, our fundraising platforms, are focused on donors. And so for cases where some customers might get less U.S. funding, government funding, they rely on us more. So our platform might be a higher percentage of the revenue because they get less grants from the government. So that hasn't been a big impact. But again, if you look back over the years, economic difficulties, COVID, very resilient marketplace.
Got it, got it. And then do you target certain size nonprofits?
We do. We are mid-tier and enterprise targets. There's lots of really small nonprofits. You could run a nonprofit using Microsoft Excel, I think, for the small ones. But we're focused on ones that are a few million in revenue and larger, and there's some very large nonprofits that are customers of ours.
Great, great. So I think we all understand the market and the addressable market a little bit more clearly. But let's dive into the product itself. So how are the products priced?
So our products, our business is a third of the business is transaction revenue. And I'll walk through those platforms. The rest of the business is cloud software. It's a subscription business. We don't have any seat pricing. So it's typically a three-year or longer contract. The transaction business, we have three platforms in that business. Two of them are a sort of a traditional payments transaction model. And a third platform is a tuition platform, which is our user model, if you will. The rest of the business is sort of a classic annual subscription fee per year and a multi-year contract.
Got it, understood. And so what does the general sales cycle look like? And who at your customer actually buys those solutions?
Yeah, it's a little different by vertical market, so typically in a nonprofit or foundation space, it's the executives that run the business. Usually a big decision because our systems are systems of record, and so it's a decision that usually the sales cycle is six to eight months. Implementations are about the same. Could be longer in an enterprise, but it's a decade decision typically for a customer because it's a system of record. It's running their revenue. Our platforms are running their performing arts center. We're running their school. In the schools, we have an ERP platform. That's a big decision for them to make, and so it's usually the executives. For our YourCause platform, we sell to companies. NASDAQ is a customer.
We are a customer.
We use the platform, so it's for their corporate social responsibility part of the business. It's for employee engagement, for employee volunteering, for donations and matching gifts. That's typically the corporate HR or corporate social responsibility group making that decision.
Understood, understood. And that's how it worked at NASDAQ. It was that group that made that decision. And we're very proud to be a customer. So we talked a lot about new logos, but can you talk a little bit more about your overall growth algorithm? And are you focused on all those new logos or more of a land and expand model?
Yeah, it's a little bit of both, so the growth algorithm, first of all, a third of the revenue is transactions, so we grow through adding customers to those engines and then just natural volume growth, and that's typically a high single digit grower for us organically. The rest of the business, the growth algorithm, some of it is just renewing contracts on our customers on our multi-year contracts or some price increases in that, and then it's our go-to-market motions, which are a combination of new logos and cross-selling to existing customers, and our sales teams are separated that way, so our go-to-market is our direct sales teams. They're focused on specific vertical markets, so for example, our K through 12 school team just sells to those schools, and then they're further separated by new logos and then expanding existing customers.
Got it, got it. So, what about it? It seems like you're having tremendous success. So, what does the competitive landscape look like? And how is that evolving with new technology?
Yeah, it hasn't changed much over the years, so our competitors are different by vertical market and different by software product. We pretty much compete with smaller single-point solution, mostly founder-led smaller businesses. There are also some competitors that have apps built on top of Salesforce or on top of Dynamics. But we don't have an enterprise-level competitor, and so each of our vertical markets will have a separate competitor, so the YourCause platform we just talked about, there are three or four smaller private firms we compete with. In the K-12 space, same thing, three or four private firms we compete with. In fundraising, there's lots of small alternatives in the fundraising space. JustGiving doesn't have much of a competitor. GoFundMe is a competitor, if you will, for JustGiving here in Europe, so that's the competitive landscape. It hasn't changed much over the years.
So I'm supposed to ask you about what you're seeing from the horizontal players and the ankle biters. So I'm just happy I got a chance to say ankle biters on stage.
Yeah, ankle biters.
Explain what that is.
I think I just addressed that, so for the horizontal players, again, there are small firms that built apps on top of Salesforce, and so in a competitive situation with Salesforce, and we see them only in a couple of markets, not in all of our markets, so in a competitive situation, like a university would be an example, so Salesforce might be across a university. We'll only compete in the foundation, and that's our specialty in the foundation, so in that competitive space, in a university foundation, if we see Salesforce, we really see a group of smaller customers with multiple apps that have to come together on the platform to try to compete with what we provide to that space, but we won't compete with Salesforce outside in the enterprise, but just in the vertical space that we focus on.
Got it, got it, understood. All right, well, it would not be a conference in 2025 without talking about AI, right? It's a requirement at this point, I think. So let's dive into AI just a little bit. So obviously, all software companies are being forced to kind of re-justify their existence in an AI world and how they're integrating AI. So can you talk to us a little bit about what Blackbaud is doing with AI and how you see it as either an enhancer or a competitor?
Yeah, so for me personally, super exciting. I'm an engineer and I've been in the software space for several decades, so I think this is a super interesting opportunity for a deep vertical system of record company like Blackbaud, and as a software company, we're both consumers and creators of AI, so on the consumption side, we have 18 or 20 products we've brought into the company, and we're using in sales and marketing, we're using in our support center, in customer success. We're using tools in engineering for code generation like Microsoft Copilot or Anthropic Claude to generate code. We've got corporate strategic relationships with Microsoft, with McKinsey, with Anthropic in engineering, so we've got, as a buyer, we're bringing in solutions to drive productivity and scale in the business, early days on that, and we're measuring KPIs and ROI for that.
And then as a software company, we're creating products. So we have over 70 capabilities in our core solutions today that are pure AI capabilities. We haven't relabeled old products to call them AI. So those are out in our system of record solutions. We just announced a new product, which is a fully agentic AI solution that will be in the market in 2026.
Wow. Can you talk a little bit more about those products specifically?
Yeah, so in the fall, like a lot of companies, we had our series of user conferences, big one in the U.S., one here, one in Sydney. We went through all of our AI capabilities and what's coming in 2026. So we announced a catalog of products. And we announced the first one, which is a development agent. So the scenario that I think is most clearly that I use for this new product is one of our customers we're working with is a university. They have 190,000 alumni. They have 32 fundraisers who are focused on 10,000 of their alumni. There's 180,000 untouched alumni. You can have software raise money for those alumni, right? So this development agent is a fully agentic fundraiser. It's a fundraiser. It's basically a software employee for our customers.
So it uses text messaging, email, and a full human avatar to reach out and build a relationship and raise money on behalf of the institution. We have customers already using that in an early adopter program. And that'll be in the market next year.
So what's the overall plan then for those, which sounds like a fantastic tool? How do you plan on your long-term plan to monetize that once these firms are all adopted onto these new models?
Yeah, sure. So first, the competitive moat, which is sort of your first question, is this product is embedded inside of our system of record. And so, for example, if I'm a manager of a half a dozen fundraisers, this will be one of my new employees inside of my system. And I will assign work to this agent. And it will raise money. And I will have metrics. And it will be under my management system inside of the system that I use today with access to the data that's in the system. And the data is proprietary data, not in the public, customer data, data that we create and add for the customer, data we procure and enrich. So it's inside of the system of record. We're bringing that to market.
So that's a cross-sell inside of existing customer solutions today that will also be, I think, generating a lot of new logos for us in the future. It's a subscription model. So it is an annual fee in a multi-year contract. And that's the model. The ROI is how much does this agent cost me as a customer? How much revenue do I get? How much is it going to produce? Now, for customers that also have our payments platform, we'll also get transaction revenue as well.
Right, a nice little flywheel there for you guys. Okay, so we talked about customer-facing products. Let's talk a little bit more and drill down one more time on your internal use of AI. So remind us again, you talked a little bit about an overall roadmap and strategy. But let's drill in a little bit more on what you're doing for internal use and how you think your own ROI will be, not your customer's ROI.
Yeah, I think there's a ton of opportunity, but I think it's pretty early, so we have several solutions in sales and marketing, so we brought in a solution about a year and a half ago to do sales forecasting, so we brought in an AI solution, sits on top of our use of Salesforce internally, ran it in parallel with our sales managers who do forecasting, and after six or eight months, it was the same accuracy as our sales managers, so going forward, though, the software does the forecasting. The managers don't do forecasting, so we remove some administrative time from all of our sales managers globally, and so when you do that, there's sort of two parts of this. One is the KPI, which is, are you removing administrative time from your leaders? So we did with our sales managers.
Then the other side of it is, what's your ROI? So we're paying the vendor for the software. So for me, the ROI is from our sales managers. We need higher quota achievement or, because you have more time, new sales executives joining the company ramp up faster because you can spend more time with them. And there's other categories when you free up administrative time. So we're measuring all of that to make sure we're getting productivity. And we have those solutions across the whole company. We have another solution that's doing, which our AI agent's doing, lead gen, fully autonomous lead gen, adding qualified leads to the top of the funnel without sales development reps calling and creating lead gen. So we have that solution running in the business. We have solutions that are having conversations with customers in our support center. Really easy use case there, actually.
Clear ROI in that case. So we're using solutions all over the company.
The forecasting, I think, is really impressive because it means that your data quality is very good, right? You can only use AI to forecast if your data is good. And so, I mean, that's just another feather in your cap that your data is high enough quality to be able to do that.
Yeah, well, we create and sell these solutions, so our internal data better be good.
That's fair. That's fair. All right, we're going to dive a little bit more into the financial side of the business and leave the customers to the side for now. So let's talk about buying back a significant number of shares over the past couple of years. You recently announced upping your authorization. So what are your capital allocation plans in the near and the midterm?
Yeah, sure. So yeah, we were pretty aggressive last year, fairly aggressive this year. We'll buy back 7% or 8% of shares outstanding this year. And we've bought back about 10% net of stock-based comp, 10% in the last two years. So pretty aggressive. So our hierarchy of capital allocation is buybacks. We're also paying down debt this year. Our debt-to-EBITDA ratio was about 2.4. It'll get closer to 2 going forward. And thirdly, small tuck-in acquisitions. So we've made a lot of acquisitions over the last 10 years. There's nothing sort of large and looming out there. But there's always interesting near-adjacency tuck-in acquisitions for us. So it is in the hierarchy, buyback, debt reduction, and tuck-in acquisitions.
Perfect. Perfect. So we have a little bit less than five minutes left. And before, I have a couple more questions. But I just wanted to open it to the audience to see if there's anything specific that you all want to talk about or touch on. We're good? Okay, we're going to keep going then. Well, let's hit one more financial question. And then I would like to just go to some of your overall closing thoughts on 2026. So you've been explicit about what investors can expect from Blackbaud regarding your financial performance. But can you go through that and the drivers to achieve them one more time? We touched on it in the very beginning. But let's return back to that.
Yeah, sure. So what you can expect for us, which is sort of shown in our results so far this year, is a few things. So from a modeling standpoint, go forward, you can expect solid single-digit organic revenue growth with some upside. So this new development agent, this new product, it's not really in our numbers yet. It's quite new. It will be in market next year. So there's some upside. Occasionally, we get viral events in our transaction engines that provide some upside. We really don't put that into our guide because you can't really predict those. So mid-single-digit organic revenue growth, higher than that, EBITDA growth, double-digit earnings per share growth, and really interesting improvements in cash flow. So we raised our cash flow guide twice this year.
We also used $60 million in our first quarter of this year for one-time events, which will come back next year. So half of that roughly was used to just get out of an office lease that we weren't using anymore. And if we would have kept that lease, it would have been $42 million over the term of the lease. So we paid off the lease. So that'll come back next year. We'll have some organic cash flow improvements next year. And then the July 5th bill that was signed in the U.S. provides some tailwinds from a cash flow standpoint. So mid-single-digit organic revenue growth, higher than that, EBITDA growth, double-digit EPS growth, and a really solid cash flow story is what you can expect from us going forward.
It's a great story. So let's just do a final wrap-up. Tell us, is there anything that we missed that we should have talked about? And then if not, let's just talk about what you're optimistic about, maybe not even related to your financials, but overall in 2026.
Yeah, I think you covered everything. I think in summary, we're a 98% recurring revenue business with really strong cash flow in a very large global, very stable end-user marketplace, right? Very stable. It was tested by COVID, tested by historic economic events, and it just keeps marching forward, so very stable business, large addressable marketplace, stable customers. Our products are all system of record, so they don't turn over that quickly. A third of the business is transactions, which is a very large addressable market. We're very aggressive, I think, as an engineering company. A large percentage of our employee base is an engineering employee base. We're being very aggressive with AI, bringing AI in to run the business, using AI to automate engineering, build new products, bring new products to market, and so we feel really good about our results this year and in the future.
We also feel very confident that we're quite undervalued. We're aggressive in buying back stock. There's a reason for that. That will continue in 2026 and beyond. It's a core part of our capital strategy.
I just want to thank you. That was a fantastic summary, by the way, and I just want to thank you for everything that you're doing for veterans, everything you're doing for foundations. I think you're doing well by doing good. We really appreciate that. We appreciate being a customer of yours, so thank you very much for joining us.
Thank you. Yeah, appreciate it.
Thanks, everyone.
Thanks, everyone.